My father and his colleague developed a scalable process to manufacture Teflon without the use of PFAS back in the previous century; they had both been recruited heavily by DuPont which made it relatively easy to sell the patents, at which point they immediately disappeared and were never acted upon.

One of the interesting side effects of free markets is that when there are no consequences for mass poisoning / polluting, you will ignore opportunities to manufacture without doing so because there is often zero or negative economic consequences to change your process.

In DuPont’s case, it was more valuable in the near term for the shareholders to ignore this manufacturing innovation and not disrupt supply than to reconfigure with a new process. No doubt there were massive risks involved in trying a new process that made it a “safer” and wiser decision economically to continue to use PFAS.

I think about this every time someone tells us on HN how a freer market will solve our problems.